‘Nothing was over. Nothing is ever over.’ Thus muses Humphrey Clark as he travels towards the small windswept northern port of Finsterness, scene of formative childhood holidays. Humphrey, a reclusive marine biologist, is on his way to collect an honorary degree. Much more significantly, at Finsterness he will re-encounter Ailsa Kelman, his childhood companion and later — secretly, briefly — his wife.
The idea that ‘nothing is ever over’ provides the momentum for this, Margaret Drabble’s 17th novel. As young adults, Humphrey and Ailsa believed that they had found a perfect, time-cheating happiness together. This failed; now, in their sixties, they try to protect themselves from emotional pain, Humphrey by reducing his life to the four walls of his study, Ailsa, a flamboyant feminist polemicist, through her exhibitionist love-affair with the media. Ailsa once famously displayed an aborted foetus — her own? Humphrey’s? — on a chain round her neck; notoriety gives her a stage presence that masks her insecurity. Humphrey has taken refuge in inertia, Ailsa in the reckless expenditure of energy. Will their reunion in memory-haunted Finsterness make them whole people once again?
The narrative travels in two directions — towards their reunion, towards the Finsterness of today, and backwards into the past, to the Finsterness of the 1940s. As so often, the sections dealing with the past are more interesting and more fully achieved. The removal of the young Humphrey’s tonsils, his grief over the death of a fish he tried to preserve, the dripping sandwiches, the defective jigsaws, the dullness of the adults — all this is a convincing backdrop to Humphrey’s loneliness and Ailsa’s rebellion. Drabble expertly charts the way our childhood experiences inform and shape us throughout our lives.
Less successful is the plot, which creaks surprisingly loudly for such an experienced novelist. Humphrey and Ailsa don’t know it, but their reunion has been orchestrated by their missing childhood friend Sandy Clegg. Sandy was Humphrey’s first great attachment, but he proved treacherous; they have not seen him since. The adult Sandy is a hollow man who lives only through the emotional lives of others. He is absent for too much of the book; when he pops up at the end to tell his story at some length, it’s not clear why we should take an interest in him. Similarly, Ailsa’s brother Tommy always lurks in the background as a vaguely malevolent figure, but nothing much comes of him, and I’m not sure what he’s for.
Hovering above Sandy and his improbable manipulations is the cowled figure of the ‘Public Orator’, part protagonist, part chorus, part authorial voice. There’s much reference to The Tempest throughout, and the Public Orator is like a feeble Prospero. The note he strikes is falsely portentous; he’s a device that simply doesn’t work.
‘Does a story have to have a meaning?’ ‘Does a meaning have to have a story?’ Two minor characters ask these questions, which inadvertently highlight the novel’s central weakness — the ‘meaning’ has been crammed into an ill-fitting story. The prose is strangely inconsistent, sometimes sloppy and repetitive, with lines of poetry irritatingly misquoted, sometimes precise, assured, even luminous. But Humphrey and Ailsa are solid and credible; Drabble’s delicate handling of the fears and yearnings of their incipient old age makes The Sea Lady rise above its failings.
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